The Iraq War is rapidly winding down, and no one - American or Iraqi - seems inclined to talk about it

Eight years ago, U.S. paratroopers streamed into northern Iraq. Now, the U.S. is withdrawing / AP

The Iraq War began with Pentagon officials boasting about an initial
offensive that would "shock and awe" the enemy, then-President George W.
Bush flying a military plane to an aircraft carrier for a high-profile
address to thousands of cheering troops, and round-the-clock coverage on
the nation's TV networks. Eight and a half grueling years later, the
deeply unpopular conflict is set to end with a whimper, not a bang.

Washington
and Baghdad's failure to agree on a troop-extension deal means that
virtually all of the 43,000 U.S. troops now in Iraq will stream out of
the country over the next six weeks, bringing a quiet end to a conflict
that began with so much bombast.

Radical
Shia cleric Moqtada al-Sadr has called for public rallies on Jan. 1 to
celebrate the U.S. withdrawal, but the idea hasn't gained much traction
with other Iraqi political leaders. For now, there are no formal
ceremonies planned in Iraq to mark the end of the U.S.-led mission there
or to commemorate the thousands of Americans and hundreds of thousands
of Iraqis killed in the conflict.

Iraqi officials have also
rebuffed the U.S. officers at many individual bases who have proposed
low-key events in which the American flag would be lowered and the Iraqi
one raised to mark each facility's passage into Iraqi control.

"The message we're getting, to be frank about it, is, 'Don't let the
door hit you on the way out,'" a senior military official said in a
conversation on Sunday.

U.S. officials publicly insist that
Washington is continuing to discuss a possible troop extension with
Baghdad, and it's possible - though highly unlikely at this late date -
that a deal will be cobbled together to allow several thousand American
troops to remain in Iraq past the end of the year.

Privately,
though, U.S. military officials with direct knowledge of the informal
negotiations, who asked not to be identified because of the sensitivity
of the matter, say the two sides have never been close to an agreement
and that the talks have effectively broken off in recent days. Two
officials said in separate interviews this weekend that the most recent
sticking point had been Iraq's insistence that any remaining U.S. troops
receive no legal immunity from Iraqi courts -- an absolute non-starter
for Pentagon officials concerned about the possibility American soldiers
could be arrested and put on trial in Iraq.

But the officials told National Journal the
two countries have been even further apart than has been reported. The
Obama administration had expressed public and private willingness to
leave 2,000-3,000 U.S. forces in Iraq as trainers beyond the end of
2011, but the officials said the conversations with the Iraqis had never
advanced far enough to include discussions of specific troop levels or
missions.

"We were still at first base in the talks," the second
military official said. "The Iraqis knew what we were willing to do, but
they never wanted to talk specifics or really get down to the kind of
nitty-gritty details you'd need to square away before you do a deal like
this."

In the absence of official word from either Washington or
Baghdad, confusion about the pending withdrawal -- and the future of
individual units -- is running rampant. CNN reported this weekend that
the Fourth Brigade Combat Team, First Armored Division, based at Fort
Bliss in Texas, was being pulled out of Iraq months ahead of schedule.
But a senior U.S. commander said on Monday that only one battalion had
actually received orders to withdraw to Kuwait in preparation for
returning home. The officer said the rest of the brigade was continuing
to conduct missions throughout the country and hadn't received final
word of when it would withdraw.

The collapse of the troop-extension talks won't remove all U.S. forces from Iraq. As first reported by National Journal,
hundreds of troops will remain in Iraq indefinitely as part of the
enormous U.S. consulates under construction in Basra and Erbil. Each
facility will ultimately house roughly 1,300 personnel, including troops
from the State Department's Office of Security Cooperation, which
oversees weapons sales to Baghdad and security training.

The
Erbil consulate, in a tranquil city in northern Iraq's Kurdistan region,
will be technically designated as a joint consulate/Office of Security
Cooperation facility, which means it will have the largest concentration
of American troops other than the embassy in Baghdad, which is expected
to house roughly 200 troops.

State Department officials said
the final size of the overall U.S. military presence hasn't been
finalized but could ultimately range as high as 500 troops. Even that
figure would be less than a quarter of the troop presence that the Obama
administration had quietly endorsed just a few weeks ago.

Regardless
of the final number, however, two things appear clearer than ever: The
Iraq War is rapidly winding down, and no one - American or Iraqi - seems
inclined to talk about it.

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